Horace Donisthorpe

Horace St. John Kelly Donisthorpe (17 March 1870 – 22 April 1951) was an eccentric British myrmecologist and coleopterist, memorable in part for his enthusiastic championing of the renaming of the genus Lasius after him as Donisthorpea, and for his many claims of discovering new species of beetles and ants.

Educated at Mill Hill House, Leicester, and Oakham School, Donisthorpe went to Heidelberg University to read medicine.

[1] Derek Wragge Morley says in his obituary of Donisthorpe in Nature, that he related a story of how, when a young man, he had swum across the Rhine at Heidelberg, "a feat which, so it was said, no one had achieved before".

[4] Donisthorpe was controversial in part because he was often considered overeager in his attempts to describe new species of ants and beetles.

[7] Donisthorpe's extensive and beautifully curated collection of British beetles is housed at the Department of Entomology at the Natural History Museum.